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Topic: Magazine Cleaning Guide (Read 22835 times)

Welcome, so it seems you have an interest in learning how to clean Magazine scans. This guide is going to look like crap format wise, but ideally you'll be able to get a better understanding for some things written in this guide.

Denoise 3> Suppress noise slider - Increases the amount of 'blur' that is applied to the image, this is the main 'denoising' aspect of the filter. I normally keep this around the 0.8 marker [0.70-1.00]

>Clean Slider - This changes the amount the image is 'flattened' by. Think of it as a special surface blur within the filter. I like to have a fairly high value at 0.70 [0.5-0.7]

>Recover Details slider - this basically just recreates noise from the raw image. It's counter productive to what we're doing.

>Reduce blur slider - This is relatively important, it decreases the 'blur' effect from the suppress noise slider. It makes edges sharper in its own right, but it has a great effect on making the tones more uniform and easier for topaz denoise 5 to work with. I like having this around 0.4 [0.20-0.40]

>Advanced tab values all at 0

It's better to preview the image at 200% zoom within the denoise 3 filter. It'll give you a better idea of what the screentones look like and how flat the black/white areas are.

Denoise 5The purpose of this filter initially in our process is to make the screentones more uniform while blurring the now-flattened black and white areas of the page.The only sliders you have to adjust are:

>Overall Strength - This will affect the blur applied to the page. You only want to blur the image slightly, so keep this slider between 0.20-0.35.

>Reduce blur - This is mainly just to keep the black edges on the page from getting too blurry and bleeding out. Keeping it around 0.10-0.13 is fine.

The reason we don't use the other sliders is because they're mainly just changing the contrast or sharpening the page in less reliable ways than what photoshop has to offer natively.

You can also use denoise 5 to even out screentones/blur dirt after leveling. After leveling at 8000px resize to 3000px height, then use the denoise 5 filter:

>Overall Strength - 0.80-1.00>Reduce blur - 0.00-0.13

Surface BlurThis isn't exactly a denoise filter but I'm going to tack it onto this section anyways. Surface blurs can be used to save a ton of time with burning and dodging. Essentially it will flatten the black and white areas of the page, this is extremely useful if your scans have retained a paper texture. You can throw a surface blur in at 3 different points in the cleaning process, but usually you'll only want to use the filter once per page.

Surface blur before Denoise 3 - This is useful if your page has massive paper textures, flattening them with a 7/10 or 10/10 surface blur will help Denoise 3 work more efficiently.

Surface blur after Denoise 3 but before Denoise 5 - This is useful because at this point your blacks/whites are blurry from denoise 3, flattening them makes denoise 5 remove dirt on blacks a lot easier. Keep it around 4/5 or 6/7.

Surface blur after Denoise 5 - This would be used mainly to flatten textures before leveling, using a surface blur here isn't to help the denoise filters and is based on your judgement.

I'd suggest playing with surface blurs at each of these points to see how it affects the process, they can be extremely useful in a pinch!

Denoise filters at their core are fancy blurs. They have a habit of blurring out 'textured' areas, black/white line details on patterned areas, or making white details on black areas turn to mush.Once you level these details will be lost/destroyed. It's our job as cleaners to have our screentones looking top notch while keeping as much of the original detail as possible.It's not possible to do this without recovering details from the raw image.

These techniques can be applied at almost any step in the cleaning process, so if you see something's missing you can always grab it from the raw. Keep in mind though that doing it at 3000px will yield the best results.Line Detail RecoveryLine Detail Recovery is normally done before resizing to 8000px for leveling but after denoising. We use a sharpened copy of the raw layer with the layer-mode set to darken for black lines, and a separate identical layer set to lighten or screen for the white details.

Duplicate the raw layer, sharpen it a fair bit so the details stand out (unsharpen mask 60-80%, 0.9). Create a mask and then use either the line tool or the brush tool to 'mask out' these details from the layer using a black coloured brush/line tool on the mask. Once you have masked out the details you want to keep, you invert the mask, level slightly (usually only for blacks), then change the layer mode.Merge these with the cleaning layer, you might want to duplicate the layers and keep copies during cleaning in case you need to touch anything up after leveling/the potential 3rd denoising at 3000px.

Raw Texture RecoveryAnother type of recover is Raw-texture/pattern recovery.This form of recovery can be done at almost any time during cleaning as you just have to go to the raw layer and grab the selection.Personally I prefer doing the selection at 3000px either before resizing/leveling or after resizing/leveling. There are some cases where I have to do it at final size as well if topaz messes up something I didn't think it would, or if I just missed it. Doing this at 3000px does make it look better since you're leveling a pattern at close to the original size rather than a smaller, down-scaled version. Since topaz ends up messing up these texture-based patterns you need to go extract them from the raw, using either the pen tool or polygonal lasso (I prefer pen/paths tool) select the area then layer via copy onto a new layer. From there sharpen it then level.

Random tip: When working with/on a mask pressing the \ key toggle your selection to the colour red. This is useful for keeping track of what you've done.

Topaz clean filtering serves to smooth out pattern gradients, and helps to make white-dirt on black areas fainter (easier to burn)Settings breakdown.

Threshold controls the balance between smoothing gradients and blurring out line-details.Sharpness controls the edge and screen tone sharpness.texture controls how prominent the screentones are.

Though topaz clean is a great filter, it does have its flaws.

Topaz DustTopaz clean is notorious for creating a fine layer of dust on the whites of the image. Dust ExampleAfter the filter has completed, level the blacks and whites by at least 5 each to make sure this dust is gone.

Topaz Clean RingsIf you attempt to use the filter on a page as is, it has a high possibility of creating a 'Topaz Clean Ring.' This is when topaz clean creates a jagged/overly sharp line, several pixels thick, around the edge of your page's patterned edges. Here's an exaggerated example: http://i.imgur.com/UoS2moK.jpgTo avoid this you need to expand canvas by 100px each side - relative, then if there's blank space, fill it with white. (I find creating a white fill layer behind the clean layer, then merging it down works best). After your tc3 filtering you contract the canvas and continue with the page. Here is an action that will expand/fill the canvas and contract it by the same amount: Download

There are two reliable ways to sharpen. Unsharpen Mask, and the High pass filter Overlay method.http://i.imgur.com/iCEnjik.pngSince you're increasing the contrast of the image's contents denoise filters and leveling the page will have stronger effects.Adding on to what the above image said, when using the high pass filter try to keep the radius value low (I never go above 1.0).To sharpen using high pass filter duplicate the cleaning layer, run high pass filter 1.0 on it, then change the high pass layer's mode to overlay. To decrease the sharpness you can lower the opacity of the high pass filtered layer. Once you've gotten your ideal sharpen settings using the high pass layer, you must merge it with the cleaning layer before continuing to edit the page.

When using the Unsharpen mask filter I like to keep my settings anywhere from 36%/0.9radius - 80%/0.9radius, depending on the page you might have to sharpen again between denoise 3 and 5.

Sometimes denoising a page won't remove all the dirt from the image, rather than opting for increasing the denoise str values and blurring the page more you can selectively fix the crummy areas.

To remove additional dirt after denoising (before leveling) use the quickmask tool (default shortcut is Q) brush over the areas you want to remove dirt from with black (patterns only) Press Q again to go from the mask to a selection, invert your selection so only the areas you want are selected. Sharpen more, denoise 5 at max str, .13 reduce blur.

You can also attempt to use the spot healing brush; Mode: replace; Type: Content-Aware at 8000px, brush size has to be around the same size as a set of 4 tone-dots at 8000px or a bit larger, you will be clicking once over the dirt area to ideally get rid of it. This might need a bit of undo/re-clicks for the content aware aspect to not mess up. Try not to brush over large areas with this as content aware algorithm messes up a lot.

Taking advantage of the content aware fill method can help if you don't want to play around with the spot healing brush, make your selection then 'edit > fill'